STAIRCASE FARMS OF THE ANCIENTS
Astounding Farming Skill of Ancient Peruvians, Who Were
Among the Most Industrious and Highly
Organized People in History
BY O. F. CooK
BOTANIST OF 'THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY--YALE UNIVERSITY EXPEDITION
'To PERU IN 1915, AND OF THE BUREAU OF PLANT INDUSTRY
OF TIE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
A GRICULTURE is not a lost art,
but must be reckoned as one of
those that reached a high develop
ment in the remote past and afterward
declined, and has not yet recovered its an
cient prestige. The system of agriculture
developed by the ancient Peruvians en
abled them to support large populations
in places where modern farmers would be
helpless.
The most specialized development of
agriculture in the Western Hemisphere
was attained, unquestionably, in Peru,
and the culmination was reached cen
turies ago, before Columbus discovered
America. Still farther back there must
have been a period of slow and gradual
development-a period to be expressed in
millenniums rather than in centuries. At
a time when our ancestors in northern
Europe were still utter savages, clothed
only in skins, and living by hunting and
fishing, settled agricultural communities
must have existed in the Peruvianregion,
perhaps in the same valleys that contain
the marvelous remnants of the prehis
toric art.
The people who did the finest of the
ancient work are not only gone and for
gotten, but lack even the distinction of a
name. Written records like those of
Egypt and Assyria are lacking in Peru.
and even tradition has failed to attach
names of kings or nations to many of the
ancient monuments. Some writers refer
to the builders as Megalithic or Big-Stone
people, because they used very large
stones, like the fabled Cyclopes of the
ancient Greeks, who built massive walls
and worked in metals. Other writers re
fer to the ancient Peruvians simply as
pre-Incas, because their work evidently
belongs to an age farther back than the
Inca empire conquered by the Spaniards.
As a race, it may be assumed that the
Megalithic people were ancestors of the
modern Quichuas, or at least of the same
stock, for there is nothing to show that the
human type was different in ancient times.
In Peru, as in ancient Egypt, it was the
custom to mummify the dead and to bury
with the mummies the clothing, food,
household utensils, weapons, and other
objects and articles used by the living.
This regard of the ancients for their
dead, together with the dry, equable cli
mate, have made Peru a veritable treas
ure-house of archaeological material. Not
only the skeletons and the other physical
features of the ancient people are known,
but also the nature and degree of devel
opment of all of the arts that could be
preserved by burial. The general result
of such studies tends to show that the
modern Quichuas, the Incas conquered
by the Spaniards, and the pre-Inca or
Megalithic people were all of the same
race and practiced the same arts, includ
ing the art of agriculture.
The Incas had a very specialized agri
culture, but their predecessors had some
of the agricultural arts still more highly
developed. They built larger terraces
and faced them with larger stones, fitted
with wonderful accuracy. The Incas also
built extensively, but generally with less
skill, or at least with less labor, bedding
their stones and plastering their walls
with clay, instead of taking the trouble to
work down and fit together the huge ir
regular blocks that characterize the Meg
alithic period.